Alex Parker vividly remembers walking along Route 116 on the afternoon of Jan. 14, when he saw ambulances with lights flashing parked in front of a small house with a white picket fence.

The 17-year-old South Hadley High School football player didn't think much of the sight until later on that evening when he learned that 15-year-old high school freshman Phoebe Prince had committed suicide that afternoon.

ABOUT THIS STORY »

A team of UMass journalism students spent the fall of 2010 reporting on approaches to curbing bullying in South Hadley and beyond as part of an investigative journalism class. One year after the tragic suicide of Phoebe Prince, MassLive.com is publishing a group of final projects from the class.

"Honestly, I didn't believe it, you could ask anybody I was with that night at driving school, I didn't believe it," said Parker, who recalled seeing Prince crying in the hallway on her way to the guidance counselor's office earlier that afternoon.

"For the most part, she seemed like a really happy person. But that day, she seemed really upset ... Later when I found out that that's where she lived I was like ... that sort of was an eye-opener."

Prince's suicide swiftly propelled the small Western Massachusetts town of South Hadley into the international limelight. On March 29 former Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel initiated criminal charges against former South Hadley High School students Sean Mulveyhill, Kayla Narey, Flannery Mullins, Sharon Chanon Velazquez and Ashley Longe that included civil rights charges in connection with Prince's suicide. In addition, Mulveyhill and Austin Renaud have been charged with statutory rape with regard to Prince. Those trials are set to begin later this year.

For Parker, Prince's death had a deep impact. Even though he had only spent time with her once earlier that fall, Parker said he felt compelled to join the South Hadley High School Anti-Bullying Task Force Steering Committee because he felt a lingering sense of responsibility for not being able to help Prince the day she died.

"One of the reasons that I do this now is because I could have helped prevent what happened, because had I just gone and tried to talk to her, like if I had known the situation of everything that was going on, I would have really tried to reach out to her. But I never really got a chance to because I had no idea as to why she was upset or anything," he said.

Republican file photoSouth Hadley High School principal Daniel T. Smith speaks at a 2010 meeting of the South Hadley Anti-Bullying Task Force.

A PARENT'S TAKE ON SOUTH HADLEY SCHOOLS

Susan Parker, Alex's mother, shares her perspective on the school and its administrators.

Listen to the interview by hitting the play button above, or click here to download the file.

Parker said that following the vigil held in honor of Prince, he approached school officials to ask how he could become involved in bullying prevention efforts.

"It made me realize that everything that has gone on, everything that happened was unacceptable. And I wanted to help reduce it and prevent it," he said.

That is how Parker came to join the Anti-Bullying Task Force Steering Committee, a 29-member group, which is made up of school administrators, teachers, clergy, community members and students. The task force was created last February amid intense media pressure following Prince's death. Its central purpose is to create a clear plan for how both the school and the community can intervene and prevent bullying.

Teachers at the high school underwent training in the beginning of the school year designed to help them identify and stop bullying in the classroom, said Amy Foley, an English and Special Education teacher at South Hadley High, and a member of the community programs subcommittee of the task force. During the training, Foley said that teachers learned to identify both bullies and bystanders and had been trained to use a new electronic system that would allow students to report bullying incidents anonymously.

Training to identify and prevent bullying is now a requirement in all Massachusetts public schools under the anti-bullying law. The law is considered one of the toughest anti-bullying policies in the country because it requires that all public school officials, including bus drivers, cafeteria workers and janitors, report incidents of bullying to school administrators. If the bullying reported can be considered a criminal act, principals are required to report incidents to local police.

In addition to developing a new school policy, the task force has also organized a number of intervention and prevention training sessions for students, school staff and South Hadley residents, including a suicide prevention workshop in September, said Parker. On Nov. 2 and Nov. 3, bullying expert Rosalind Wiseman spoke to parents, students and teachers about strategies for dealing with bullying at the invitation of the task force.

"I worked with (Rosalind Wiseman) when she was coming to my school to do a presentation. That was Election Day for the state ... and then the next day she did a type of training course with a selected group of student leaders, to talk with them and try and find out some of the root causes of the problems in our school," said Parker.

He said that Wiseman's most helpful advice in her Owning Up curriculum pertained to how students could confront their peers who were either bullying them or bullying another student in the school.

"(Wiseman) gave us a tool called the SEAL (Stop, Explain, Affirm and Acknowledge, Lock) ... it was a technique that I think she made up, and it's about confronting people that are bothering you and not asking them to stop doing it, but telling them that they have to stop doing it," said Parker.

Participation in the task force has dwindled dramatically from the first meeting last winter where about 300 people gathered in the high school auditorium to discuss strategies for tackling bullying, said Foley. Attendees at the first meeting divided into eight different groups that would become the subcommittees of the task force. Foley said that she decided to become the co-facilitator of the community action subcommittee because she had grown up in the town and her two children, ages 10 and 7, were in the South Hadley school system.

Foley said that the community programs subcommittee that she co-facilitated with another English teacher focused primarily on creating a code of conduct for the town. The subcommittee has widely publicized the code of conduct they developed through the distribution of fliers, petitions, and banners with the code of conduct's acronym, RESPECT.

The RESPECT acronym was borrowed from a code of conduct in Alberta, Canada, said Foley. However, the words of the original acronym were replaced to represent the values that people in South Hadley wanted to treat others with.

"We had between 45 to 50 people in a classroom to brainstorm different ideas that they had that they thought the town needed and one of the things that came out of that was a community code of conduct," said Foley. "At the second meeting, I think we took all of those ideas that came out of the first meeting and then kind of prioritized what needed to get done first, and the community code of conduct was at the top of the list."

Foley said that both community members and students have been very supportive of the new code of conduct.

"On the second day of school at the high school ... I was able to speak with each class to kind of explain what the code of conduct was and it was very well received," said Foley. "I explained to them that there was going to be a banner there for them to sign, and the banner was put outside the cafeteria for kids to sign. I think within about two days it was filled with signatures, so it seemed to go over really well with them."

Both Parker and Foley declined to publicly comment on current bullying in the high school, or how teachers' and administrators' approaches to bullying had changed since Prince's death.

However, Foley said that she believed that the focus on bullying in South Hadley following Prince's death has helped to make children more aware of both the impact of bullying and the need to speak up if they are being mistreated or if they see another student being mistreated.

"I think kids as a whole are becoming more aware of bullying. Hopefully they will feel more empowered because really if we want to make any headway towards trying to eliminate bullying, its really getting students to report it."

Despite the amount of negative press that the town has received following Prince's suicide, she said that she felt that South Hadley was not much different from any other small New England town.

"I think there is a lot of support out there for South Hadley. I've heard teachers who teach in other communities say it very easily could have been our school, its a problem that is not specific to South Hadley, its a universal problem," said Foley. " ... I think South Hadley really has been very resilient and its really showing the country or whomever is watching that it is a good place."